


How to Survive

by exfatalist



Series: How-To Guides [5]
Category: Young Avengers
Genre: Alien Biology, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Anal Sex, Egg Laying, Knotting, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mpreg, Self-Lubrication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-01
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 02:19:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/780641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exfatalist/pseuds/exfatalist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Several years into their marriage, Billy and Teddy get not one but two unexpected surprises.</p>
<p>-</p>
<p>Young Avengers set in an Omegaverse, futurefic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Survive

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : This story takes place several years after _How to Break_. As indicated by the tags, it also contains both mpreg and egg laying.

January was bitterly cold early on, with the threat of a snow storm looming over the entirety of the northeast. After several days of scattered flurries, which accumulated on the front stoop of their brownstone in a slick mess, the meteorologist on the news finally reported a winter weather advisory in effect for the entirety of the state. 

Ted volunteered to brave the weather - and, really, the madness that it brought out in people who did last-minute survival shopping - for the ‘essentials’ they might need in case they ended up being snowed in. When he returned home, kicking the snow off his boots outside the door, he was carrying a large reusable shopping bag in one hand and a five gallon capacity gas can in the other, fumes reeking heavily as he carried it.

"How was the store?" Billy wondered from the kitchen. He accepted the groceries as Ted passed him by, laughing softly at his husband's surly expression, as if that was answer enough.

Ted continued back through the house, sliding open the door to the four foot square patio (with a one by four rectangle of grass) in the fenced off area behind their home. He settled the gas can inside the small closet of a gardening shed they had there, right next to a modestly sized generator. They were Avengers, they were kind of prepared for things like blizzards.

When he came back inside, Billy was looking expectantly at him from behind the kitchen island, eyebrows up in a fashion Ted had come to recognize as accusatory. 

"What did I forget?"

Billy raised his eyebrows impossibly higher and held up the carton of ice cream that Ted had actually _fought_ a man for in the grocery store.

"What?" he wondered.

Billy sighed, but it wasn't without a small hint of a smile playing behind the attempt at looking annoyed. "There is one flavor of ice cream your child absolutely does not want to eat by proxy and that flavor is - "

" - strawberry," they said in unison, Ted finally realizing his mistake.

He wrinkled his nose, because he loved strawberry and was vaguely offended on strawberry's behalf that the baby apparently didn't like it at all. "I had to fight a guy for that. Maybe the baby needs to learn that compromise is the cornerstone of diplomacy."

Billy tried to hold the cross look for a moment longer, but ultimately burst out laughing. "Hey," he defended between laughs, "if it was up to me, I'd be having strawberry ice cream all day, every day, but this guy wants chocolate. Double chocolate, fudge chocolate, chocolate syrup, you name it."

Ted narrowed his eyes and reached out to take the carton of strawberry ice cream. "There was no more chocolate. Just like there was no more eggs or milk or bread. Everyone is making french toast and eating the ice cream our baby wants you to eat. I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do."

Except, of course, that he had bought eggs, milk, and bread two days ago, enough to last them through the storm, because they were Avengers and they kind of prepared for this sort of thing. Only he had forgotten the ice cream and promised to buy some when he went out for extra candles, that cereal Billy often had cravings for, pickles, and gas for the generator, all of which were most assuredly filed under ‘storm essentials.’

"Well," Billy sighed as he folded up the reusable bag and stuffed it back into one of the kitchen drawers, "I knew you were too gorgeous to be able to remember a five item grocery list. It's okay. We'll survive _somehow_."

Rolling his eyes, Ted moved to put the ice cream away. He opened the fridge and grabbed for the jar of pickles, which was the biggest the store offered, opening it and offering Billy a dill in consolation. "I'm sorry. I'll call Tommy and have him run through the storm all the way down to Virginia and get you all the chocolate ice cream he can carry. How's that?"

Billy leaned in and took a bite of the pickle, dripping juice and looking none too concerned about it. "I guess that'll be okay."

"Good," Ted answered. He held onto the pickle until Billy had worked it down to a nub, then took the last bite for himself with a triumphant flourish, amused at the epic pout it garnered from his partner. "Seriously, though. If the power goes out, we should be set for a while with the generator. I just might need you to melt a path from the back door to the shed if we get the four feet of snow they're predicting. Will that be a problem?"

Compulsively, Ted reached out and placed his hand low on the swell of Billy's belly. He didn't want to ask too much of Billy, not after the goddamn _miracle_ of him managing to conceive, but Billy didn't look too worried at all.

"I'm fine," he assured. "We'll need the generator to keep the incubation unit running. I'm not going to let Dorrek Jr freeze to death."

Ted smiled. "I know."

◊

Dorrek Jr had been more of a surprise than a miracle.

Ultimately, he had just assumed that married life - and Billy changing his educational intent from pre-med to culinary school - had contributed to his getting a little, well, fat. It wasn't that noticeable, even in his skin tight uniform, though Tommy had the audacity to call him Shatner and inquire after his girdle when he mentioned the extra bit of paunch he'd begun to accumulate.

It wasn't until a chance meeting with Xavin and Karolina that Ted realized it was much more than just Billy's tendency to bake cupcakes by the dozen. 

"May I be the first to offer congratulations to you, Dorrek!" Xavin announced with the broadest smile Ted had ever seen the Skrull wear. It was a little off-putting, perhaps even scary. 

"Congratulations?" Ted asked slowly, uncertainly.

"On your offspring!" Xavin clarified. "I did not know it was your intention to begin a clutch. It is my sincere hope that your first hatchling's shell is hard and difficult to break!" 

This seemed like a compliment of some kind, but Ted couldn't really work out how it was. 

Instead, he stared long and hard at Xavin, as if the explanation might be written somewhere in the set of the Skrull's jaw or eerily pleased smile. He ultimately admitted defeat. "Xavin, I have no idea what you're talking about."

Xavin looked at Karolina, as if to ask for assistance, but she seemed as stunned as the rest of them. She looked at Billy and Billy offered a shrug in response. 

"Dorrek," Xavin said seriously. "You jest with me. Surely you know that you are brooding."

"I - " Ted began, then stopped and looked perplexed. "I'm what?"

"How do I say this with more clarity?" Xavin demanded, flustered and growing agitated. "You intend to hatch offspring! You are to bear your own hier! You shall lay an egg!"

This seemed to be a siren call to Tommy, who sped up to them at what felt like mach two, his laughter loud enough to precede him. "Are you kidding me? You're going to lay an egg? Like a chicken?"

"No!" Xavin exclaimed. "Do not mock Dorrek in such a fashion. You fail to understand. You humans and your many breeders. It is nothing compared to the majesty of a Skrull clutch."

Billy, who had been silent during all this, spoke up with the question Ted had been struggling to form the entire time. "Are you saying that Ted's pregnant?"

Xavin looked affronted. "If that is how you choose to speak of it, yes. But it is nothing so - strange - as internal gestation."

Tommy was on the ground by that time, clutching his stomach and laughing riotously at Xavin's serious, stern discussion of Skrull breeding technique. 

"I do not understand why your brother laughs," Xavin admitted. "I have found that the hatchlings of a male's clutch have more fighting spirit than any other. And a royal clutch is always regal. This is a joyous occasion."

"Yes," Ted agreed, albeit uncertainly, and Billy nudged Tommy in the ribs with his foot until he stopped laughing (or, at least, stopped laughing quite so much).

After that chance encounter, Ted decided to pay a visit to Doctor Strange to get a second opinion. It ended up being a rather invasive affair, complete with a conference call with Tony Stark and then Noh-Varr, who apparently knew quite a bit about Skrull breeding techniques as part of his military training. Granted, most of his knowledge was from the perspective of how to eradicate said clutches and they all shared a very annoyed look until Noh-Varr demanded to know if they wanted his help or not.

Ultimately, Doctor Strange declared him to be in the midst of forming an egg, which had yet to be fertilized, and Noh-Varr was able to provide specifics on how to properly create a nest for the egg itself, but no one was able to tell him how the hell it got from inside his stomach cavity to the nest. Stark had some pretty disgusting things to say about how he thought it might work, but luckily Strange disconnected the call before they were subjected to much of it.

Ted ended up meeting up with Xavin again and demanding more information, mostly the specifics of actually laying the damn thing, because he needed to know all the details before he made any rash decisions about actually laying it. When he was able to finish his entire coffee and bagel without throwing up all over Xavin, Ted decided it might be all right to discuss it with Billy.

"So," Billy said slowly, "I, uh ... do I still ... do we do it normally?"

"As far as I can tell," Ted agreed. "Xavin was really vague on the specifics. But I'm pretty sure it's the same. We have sex, egg maybe gets fertilized, and then I do something I'm not going to talk about in any grave detail and we have an egg we need to watch over for about two years."

Billy whistled at the amount of time it took to properly hatch a Skrull offspring, but still nodded. "Okay."

“Okay?” Ted asked, sounding surprised.

Billy blushed, but didn’t break eye contact. “No one can tell me if I can have kids. We haven’t talked about it, but I think it’s safe to assume that I can’t. As much as I hated being an omega as a kid, I kind of hate it more that I ruined our chances of having a baby together. So. Yeah. Okay.”

Ted smiled and reached out to take Billy’s hand in his own. “Okay,” he agreed.

◊

It had been a little over a year since they started, as Xavin had put it, _their clutch_. It seemed a little strange to call it a clutch, when there was only one egg, but Ted didn't mind. Together with Tony Stark, who was more than happy to have a weird alien science project to work on, Ted pieced together an incubation chamber that ran somewhere in the middle of Xavin's non-exact specifications and Noh-Varr's somewhat militaristically influenced ones. It was large enough to house the egg and keep it at the necessary temperature. It even had a low enough energy draw to be plugged into a regular household socket without drastically increasing their electric bill, which was mostly Tony’s contribution to the project.

The only catch was they needed to keep it in the closet, because the egg apparently needed darkness in some sort of simulation of being buried, and Ted had a tendency to want to look at it almost every waking moment of the day.

Just when he was beginning to get antsy about the egg itself, about not being able to wait a whole two years until their hatchling pecked its way out of its shell, Billy plastered himself against Ted's back and purred in his ear that he was feeling really, really warm. That was Billy's way, now, of saying that he was going into heat, because Ted had absolutely no way of sensing that by smell and seeking Billy out. And Billy seemed to like that dynamic, seemed to be at peace with being the one to initiate things, rather than being drawn out and cornered well before even he knew it was time.

Now, with years of experience as lovers and all the desire in the world to communicate openly with each other, they had established a nice ebb and flow to their dynamic. After all, there was nothing that said, absolutely, that either of them had to be dominant or had to want to be dominated. Billy couldn't take a single suppressant drug anymore, not without risking his health again, so there was always that nagging feeling between the two of them that he would need to be knotted, as many times as he could, to stave off the worst of his heat, but they discovered over time that it didn't have to necessarily be the way it was in movies.

In fact, Billy wound up on top more often than not, straddling Ted's hips and gripping the headboard, thighs quivering and lungs burning for oxygen, taking what he needed with Ted's loving encouragements urging him on. And, well, Ted liked to feel that he had the upperhand when it came to alpha males. He could tell when the best time to shift a knot would be, by the way Billy's breath hitched and hips began to stutter in their movements, right when he was on the edge of orgasm and needed just a little nudge to finish. Shifting then, filling Billy up until that little sob caught in the back of his throat, then letting the way Billy would squeeze tight around him draw out his own orgasm, was absolute bliss.

The first few years of their marriage had been a study in how they wanted to fit together, rather than spent fearfully wondering if they _could_.

They wanted to and they did and it was perfect. That was all that mattered.

Billy drew him away from standing longingly outside the closet door and tugged him into their bedroom. It was summer and it was scorching hot outside. The window unit was on in the master bedroom, blasting cool air into the darkened room, and it felt heavenly. Billy was on him instantly, devouring his mouth and working hurriedly at each piece of his clothing. Billy's skin felt hot to the touch, like it always did, and Ted was torn between wanting to help him cool off and wanting to crawl into his skin to live inside his warmth. 

"I love you," Ted groaned, when Billy had him stripped down and pushed him onto the bed, on his hands and knees. Sometimes it was like this, sometimes Billy wanted to take over and fuck Ted through his first two or three orgasms. Not because it gave him much relief, but because Ted loved it and Billy, from time to time, rebelled against the idea of not being in control.

Billy slid two slick fingers into him with hardly any warning and Ted howled into the pillows, pushing back for more. He could shift himself open for Billy, his healing factor could take a lot of punishment, but Ted preferred not to abuse either in bed. He liked the way Billy stretched him with his fingers, liked the way Billy took his time with it, reducing him to a sobbing, begging mess until Billy slid inside, to the hilt, and fucked him at a hard, punishing pace.

They both came quick and messy, sweat-slick in the cool breeze from the air conditioner. But Billy was just so hot and pressed himself along the curve of Ted's back, breath warm and uneven against his neck. Billy didn't even pull out, just waited throbbing inside him until Ted caught his breath and Billy's knees stopped shaking, then he fucked into him again and it was slow, sweet, and only a little tired.

Ted ended up on his back, one leg thrown over Billy's shoulder, his hands reaching up above him to grasp the headboard of the bed, less for leverage and more to hold on as Billy thrust into him again and again. Billy's hair was wet with sweat and fell over his eyes, but what little Ted could see of his expression was one of concentrated bliss. He tilted his head against Ted's knee and sobbed quietly, the roll of his hips becoming stilted and uneven with growing exhaustion.

After that, when Billy was too tired to keep up with the pace his body demanded, Ted asked gently if he could please make love to him and Billy agreed with an eager nod, murmuring all the things he needed Ted to do to him, all the things he wanted.

It used to be difficult to get Billy onto his stomach, which was apparently some sort of position of submission, but it was infinitely easier once Billy had exhausted himself with fucking Ted. He kissed between Billy's shoulder blades and ran his hand down Billy's back, fingers sliding between his wet ass cheeks with an eager sound Ted could never seem to hold back when it came to touching Billy like this. He slid his fingers inside, one at a time, easier with Billy than Billy had been with him. Beneath him, Billy moaned into the pillows, arched his back, and pliantly moved when Ted prompted him up onto his knees. 

He loved the way Billy tasted when he was in heat. Up close, tongue pressed against Billy's hole alongside his fingers, Ted could taste what he assumed everyone else could smell. It was that perfect, unique scent that was so wonderfully Billy that it made his cock ache. Sometimes, but only sometimes, he imagined what it would be like to catch a whiff of that scent and be instantly, overwhelmingly aroused.

Other times, he didn't need to imagine that sort of thing at all.

Billy made soft, needy sounds and worked back against him shamelessly, begging for more, begging for anything, just begging. When Ted buried himself deep inside Billy's intense warmth, it was almost too much. He grasped Billy's hips, large hands all but engulfing him, and took his time building a slow, shallow rhythm until Billy was writhing and cursing and sobbing against the pillows. 

Sometimes, Ted would stop and relish in the way Billy really did cry frustrated tears, promising him everything in the world and a case to put it into if only he would just not ever stop again. But this time he didn't. He fucked into Billy just the way Billy wanted, just the way he begged for, and Billy rewarded him with intensely pleased moans and the tight squeeze of his muscles. Everything felt tense, even the air, and Billy choked back a soft sob just before Teddy shifted, burying himself deep inside his husband and engorging the base of his cock until it felt impossibly large. 

Billy made a beautiful mess on the bedsheets when he was knotted, gasping and shuddering and pressing back onto Ted's cock until Ted had no choice but to come with a hoarse shout. His breathing was ragged and his muscles quivered themselves numb with exertion, but Ted carefully moved them onto their sides and tucked Billy up against his chest protectively, concentrating on keeping himself shifted for as long as Billy needed them to stay tied.

They fell asleep just like that and Ted woke hours later, a little dazed, to find Billy  
squirming and protesting with soft little sighs against him. It was only a matter of holding Billy’s hips still with one hand and sinking into him again, taking him gently this time and not making either of them work so hard for it. Ted kissed along Billy’s shoulder and was surprised to find how eagerly Billy reacted, bucking his hips and moaning Ted’s name like a prayer. When he nipped at his skin, Billy froze and let out a helpless moan, shouting again and again _Yes, God, please, Ted, do it!_

As innocent as he had been with the playful kissing and nipping, Ted knew exactly what Billy wanted and didn’t hesitate to give it, working his way up to the apex of Billy’s shoulder and biting hard. 

Billy spasmed against him and came with little additional effort, clawing at the sheets and shouting with obvious relief. 

It meant a lot, between alphas and omegas. A claiming bite, part of forging a now forbidden bond, and Ted was surprised that Billy wanted it, begged for it, but didn’t question Billy’s motives after the fact. They had long since come to the conclusion that they could want whatever they wanted in the moment and didn’t have to wonder about deeper meanings afterward.

The only thing Ted wondered, really, was what it meant between the two of them, between an omega and an alien. If it meant anything at all.

Weeks later, when Billy couldn’t seem to stop vomiting and turned green at any mention of eggs, they found out that it actually wasn’t impossible for him to get pregnant. Ted had no idea if that was a direct result of his hapless alien attempt at a bond, but it didn’t seem too likely.

It was still a nice thought, though.

◊

Several months later, Ted was miraculously not in the doghouse for forgetting the chocolate ice cream, but did do most of the peeling, chopping, and slicing for the dinner that Billy cooked.

After a hearty stew, Ted moved into the living room, which still contained a decorated Christmas tree and whose mantle still held a menorah, to turn on the gas logs in the fireplace. With only the soft glow of the fire and the light of the street lamps outside shining in through the bay window, the room was cozy and inviting. He put on one of the best Christmas movies in existence - Die Hard - and invited Billy onto the couch with him. 

Billy settled back against Ted’s chest and Ted folded his arms around Billy warmly. They spent a while watching the movie and a little longer watching the snow come down outside, large fluffy white specks on a backdrop cast in dark orange from the street lights. Slowly, the snow blanketed the street, until the road was on level with the sidewalk, and built up heavily on the tops of the bushes outside the window, half obscuring their view.

Ted had his hand resting on Billy’s stomach, absently stroking through the fabric of his shirt, and eventually let his attention get pulled back to the movie over the snow.

“Do you think it’ll get up to four feet?” Billy wondered, sounding sleepy.

Pulling the blanket off the back of the couch, Ted draped it over his husband, making sure Billy’s feet and arms were adequately covered. “Probably,” he admitted.

“... think we’ll need the generator?” Billy asked after a long moment. He might have nodded off between the two questions, then woke up again upon realizing he hadn’t actually asked the second. 

Ted smiled and kissed his hair. “Probably not.”

Billy tugged the blanket up under his chin and smiled so contentedly that it reflected in his voice. “Can’t believe you forgot the chocolate ice cream.”

“Can’t believe my kid doesn’t like strawberries,” Ted countered.

Though Billy laughed, he didn’t have much to say in counter to it and soon enough began to snore softly. Ted had every intention of moving them after the movie, but ultimately ended up starting it over again from the beginning and dozing lightly with Billy cuddled up against him. 

In the morning, they could make french toast from their emergency provisions and see how far the snow piled up when they opened the front door. He might be called out if the Avengers were assembled to take care of any emergencies, but for the most part four feet of snow wasn’t something that worried Ted.

They were Avengers, they kind of prepared for that sort of thing.


End file.
